The Esoteric Significance of the new Human Meeting

The Esoteric Significance of the new Human Meeting

Extracts from a Lecture in the Global School of Spiritual Science

16.11.2024

Thank you Jeremy, I would gladly join and thanks everybody, for your contribution. I also thank Pam and Turil and Jeremy for their introduction, their demonstration at the beginning of the meeting. I know they practiced a lot, and you could see this in the way they practiced now, which shows as we all know from life that practice brings results. If we seriously practice, we develop faculties. And the faculties that we develop through practice, through training, through repeated exercises, they never fail us. But not only technical and artistic skills are developed in this manner, but also spiritual- moral skills. Repeated exercise brings fruits, brings results. You really create faculties. We simply rarely apply this technique to spiritual life, to moral life. But of course in daily practical life we do it all the time. We train ourselves to be professionals, we learn to play an instrument, we learn to walk as children. Think about the child, it takes a whole year to practice until it can learn to walk and so on. I mean in physical life we know the value of practice and training, just when it comes to spiritual and moral life we hope for free gifts, we want to be spoiled and lazy and say: Oh God will give me the benefit of his graceful gifts, and he will make me a good person, he will show me the angels, and all spiritual things. I don’t need to do anything. It will come like the rain and sunshine in its season. But it doesn’t! It doesn’t come.

  Why doesn’t it come, you can ask? If the good God gives us brain and sunshine and some food, from the part of the earth we didn’t destroy yet, why could he not be more generous and also give us all our needs for the soul and spirit? Why is he only providing for the physical? What kind of God is he? We want to be taken care of all the way, not only for our body, but for the soul and spirit. And we get quite angry on God, that he doesn’t do that because we feel that as his duty. But think about it, when we think like that we are like children who are angry to the parents that they don’t fulfill their emotional and intellectual needs when we are already in their 20s and 30s. We still want to be supplied on all levels like children, we don’t want to work. In other words, we don’t want this freedom that we were given. Most people today still reject the gift of freedom. They want to remain as children to receive everything as a gift without freedom. But the only beings who generously give their gift today to humanity are luciferic and ahrimanic beings. Because all the good beings offer their gift in such a way that leaves us free. Of course, they give us all their gifts, but not in such a way that the gift becomes our possession without doing anything. The gift is out there, but you have to take it. So when Christ gives you a gift, it’s already been given. But you have to take it. When Ahriman gives you a gift he drills it into your being, He makes you an automaton, he wants you to be a puppet, he pulls man by his strings and Lucifer does the same, but the Christ gives his gifts to free human beings and Michael, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out again and again, works with full concern of human freedom. He does not intervene directly in physical life and consciousness, he does not influence directly our thinking, feeling and will in the physical world. He offers all his gifts in the etheric world. But you have to go out to take them, which means you have to be active to go out to the etheric world, and then you say: oh my God, I was complaining about God not giving me gifts! I have seen so many tremendous gifts out in the etheric world just waiting to be picked up, but we are still lazy, we don’t make the effort out of our freedom, to go out of ourselves and take everything that is already provided for us.

  This applies above all to the human meeting. It applies to everything, of course, dear friends, it applies to our relationship to nature as well. Nature is already there, it’s a gift. It’s given. But how many people today really take the step to nature to take this gift, to appreciate the gift, to communicate with this gift, very few people do it today, out of freedom. So, the gift is given, nature is out there, but not many people take it. If this applies to external nature, to mineral, plant and animal, all the more so to our fellow human beings. They are all the time around us, usually it’s just something that disturbs our peace. There are too many of them. It’s very crowded if you live in the cities, but actually, it can be very crowded if there are two or three of them in one room of even in your neighborhood. In short, humans are normally things you want to avoid. Of course, in daily life you have to communicate with them to get your bread and buy your cheese, and you bump into them in the streets. So it’s really disturbing, those human beings. But think about it. The amazing thing is that here, in the other human being, I have the spiritual world directly perceptible. It’s right here through his body, is present right here. It’s true about animals, plants, and minerals, but you know that the spiritual being of the mineral is not on the earth, it’s high in the spiritual world. It’s more difficult to get to the true self of a mineral than to the true self of a plant. It’s easier with an animal and the easiest it is with another human being because the ego, the self, is in this world, not in the higher world. But we don’t use this opportunity, and we waste the most remarkable gift that we always have around us.

 You know, the Doctor says again and again: humans will feel themselves more and more empty inside. He said 100 years ago that people will less and less find the true self inside themselves. They will feel empty. But they will be able to find the true self immediately in every meeting with the other person. And he said: I hope that before too long – he said it a very long time ago – people will understand this because otherwise what will happen is what then actually happened in the 20^th century and today. The great world catastrophe is happening because people don’t use this tremendous opportunity to meet so many human Gods all around them. Walking human Gods, talking Gods, nonsense-doing human Gods, stupid human Gods, colorful outrageous human Gods, as they all are, we are surrounded by 8 Milliards of human Gods on the earth, in all cultures and continents, in our backyard, even in our families… The divine gift of all these mysterious beings is out there. But do we take this gift? No, we don’t. Most people don’t do it in our time, and this is the cause of all the social catastrophes in which we live now for a whole century and the more to come. All the conflicts, all the misunderstandings, the cruelty between people, comes about only because people don’t realize the unbelievable beauty and radiance and grandeur and sublime soul-spiritual nature of all those divine human Gods walking around us all the time. We don’t see their beauty, we don’t see their greatness, we don’t inquire: who are you for God's sake? We don’t see, as the Doctor saw, in their eyes the radiance of the eternal spirit, we don’t hear in their words how their eternal soul is speaking to us about the riddles of the universe. We don’t! But if we don’t do this, soon enough, according to the law of reversal, all the good gifts that are given to us will be transformed into the opposite, as the Doctor described so many times. Because any spiritual gift that is given, and we don’t use it for the good, is transformed into its opposite. And this is basically the reason for all the evil things on earth, as you know.

The golden rule of Knowledge of the Higher Words says that if we know something spiritual and don’t practice it, it remains a concept, and it becomes a destructive power; it does not remain a mere concept, it is transformed into its opposite in our actions. Yes, in our minds we believe we possess the great spiritual knowledge. We don’t notice that in our social practice we become more and more antisocial all the time. We don’t notice it because we don’t care about practice nor about social life. We want knowledge, but mere knowledge is luciferic and the social practice is ahrimanic. This is why Anthroposophy becomes the greatest source of luciferic-ahrimanic forces. As Rudolf Steiner said: Dear friends, I warn you, Anthroposophy is a two-edged sword like any spiritual truth; it was well known in the old mysteries, Rudolf Steiner was very decisive, with all his infinite tolerance and compassion to mortals, about that. If you receive it you must feel the greatest responsibility not to let it die in your abstract thoughts; if you don’t practice it, it will become its opposite, and it will work the opposite in the world. That’s your responsibility when you receive spiritual knowledge. This was well known in the old mysteries, but today people constantly forget it, they think they know something because they can think about it, and they don’t realize that all the time they do the opposite of what they know. They can speak about love and brotherhood and all the wonderful things, but look at our social life, even those who speak about love do with each other the opposite all the time.

 That’s where practice comes in. If you want to experience the higher worlds, you have to meditate. You cannot just sit and say: the higher worlds will come to me. If they want to come to you, they will come, that’s a grace. The grace is always there. But you should go our towards them, halfway, to meet them to receive the gift. Therefore, meeting another human being is also a question of practice, practice, practice. What do we do in our humble school? We just do what the Doctor said. We transform what he said, into practice. That’s our task. Of course, from our spiritual investigations we also add some new knowledge, about recent spiritual events. But with all due respect to our new spiritual knowledge, and we have respect to this new spiritual knowledge, it’s important spiritual knowledge, it’s but the smallest fraction of what the Doctor gave. What the Doctor gave must be practiced. It’s still not practiced. Our mentors always say: yes sure, you have to add new spiritual knowledge, by all means do it, spread it among humanity, this must be. But you have received so much knowledge 100 years ago, and from our point of view, which is very different from many good intentions and illusions prevalent among you, in respect to the most essential, crucial necessities of this age, you have truly done nothing. So please gain new knowledge, update some things that have to be updated, it’s very important, but don’t forget that the most important and urgent thing is to resurrect this huge treasure that was given on the earth 100 years ago from the grave of civilization, and make it real, make it practical, realize it on the earth, not to let it fall to Lucifer and Ahriman because. Our task is to redeem at least part of it, even a small part of it. But if the small part will redeem the essentials it’s like you redeem the whole thing, even if it is in quantity small, to redeem the heart of Anthroposophia and make it alive in our time. This is our task and the new human meetings must happen.

  Nothing will happen without the human meeting becoming practice, become real life giving daily praxis. Nothing will happen. You could possess all the knowledge in the world, you would transformed it to its opposite and Lucifer and Ahriman will continue to celebrate their possessing of anthroposophical knowledge. We don’t want to give Anthroposophy to Lucifer and Ahriman anymore, we want to give it to Christ and Michael. Here we have to work really hard, really enthusiastically with sacred devotion and reverence and love to our friends and co-workers, brothers and sisters, and then everything will be fine, everything will be successful because that’s the major problem that blocks all progress. If we do this, everything is possible. It’s the spiritual master key that opens all the human-social portals of evolution.

 Then we can reach out to all human beings, speak the language of all human beings, converse with all human beings, communicate with all human beings because we will have the new language of the heart. With the new language created in the new human meeting, we can speak with any person. They don’t have to have previous spiritual knowledge. We will use all our spiritual knowledge, that has become life, heart and will forces, to go out and meet the next person, and experience his divine being; spiritual science, transformed and embodied, will give us the forces to influence real life. But these forces we have to create in real practice because otherwise we have nothing to give, dear friends. We have to repeatedly inscribe it into our soul and heart and spiritual conscience, that we have nothing to give to other people and the world except new life-forces.

 In our time, the second century of Michael, it’s only life-forces that count, not words, not concepts, not theoretical knowledge, all this doesn’t count at all, it counts on the reverse, it becomes directly a source of social evil. We can only give humanity something vital if we have real life forces to give. I would want to shout it out loud from all the roofs, but will not do it now because of the weather. But I will say it again and again: active life-forces that can be given, means that each one of us must be a creative source and fountainhead that create a stream of new life-forces that flow from our heart and offers healing, hope, give rejuvenating love to all human beings. ‘The I AM is the source of the eternal life, come and drink from my life-giving fountain’ as Jesus Christ said. We have no other message today is we are seriously caring about humanity and earth.

  If you want to do new social life, you have to show people how you meet them. When the Doctor introduced the Dreigliederung, in each lecture he repeated it, but no one wanted to listen: It’s not the concept of the Dreigliederung that work. Concepts don’t work, people do. If the people who represent Dreigliederung don’t bring new life-forces that they created through their devotion and love, dedication, and enthusiasm, to the people they meet, nothing will happen in the social field. It’s not an idea to throw out there and hope that people will get it and do it. If you bring the idea, you have to bring the life-force of the idea. Otherwise it will not be effective, it will not work. He said, our medicines may heal, but this depends on a very strict rule. Everybody can make our medicaments, anyone can copy them, everyone can make them in his factory. Once you have the instructions, everybody can produce the same medicines. But they will not work. They will only work if we make them, but we must be people that produce, individually and as living community of physicians, united in love and brotherhood, the healing forces that stream into the medicament and the sick person.  And when your healing forces stream through the medicament that you produced, then it will work, and if you meet the sick person as incarnated spiritual riddle, it will work, and if you are united in the medical community with your medical colleagues through the new human meeting, if will work. If these three conditions are fulfilled, it will work! Of course it will not work otherwise. What works is your individually and communally created etheric healing-forces, not the substances that make up the medicament. The Doctor said, in hundred years we will not use substances anymore in this way, it is only a transitory stage, and later still- but not that far indeed- medicine will be based on spiritual healing again. Direct contact from person to person, direct and mutual streaming of life-forces will become the foundation of all medicine and all areas of human life. This will be future healing that must start now. And what his dear pupils deed? They made anthroposophical homeopathic medicaments, with machines, not by human hand, not to speak about the new human meeting and brotherhood… but they kept his physical instructions and prescriptions, and produced, therefore, very weak homeopathic meds, say, up to D10. Now you see, as happened in all other fields of anthroposophical work, the physical was conserved, the spiritual was dismissed entirely. And now in any case the pharmacy next door is selling D-50, 100 and 200, and everything works immediately. And they laugh about those stupid Anthroposophists who make such weak Ds. Of course anthroposophical medicines don’t work, because the lower Ds were intended to be augmented by human life forces, brotherhood forces, human meeting forces, the real D! Others have no limits, they dilute forever, and get tremendously effective results, because they have to scruples to replace human made life-forces by stronger centrifuges and the likes. In all fields of life this is the plain anthroposophical truth.

  Tell me, what you want to accomplish in real life? Do you want to be teachers? You know, we have teachers among us, our dear Waldorf teachers friends. What should have been, and what must become the fountain and the heart of the education of the future, the school of the future? We from all people should know it already, because I spoke about it in 2006 in the annual meeting of the Norwegian Waldorf teachers. It was published in the book, Spiritual Science in the 21^st Century, now translated to German in Ereignis Verlag.  However, none of our good school members and our dear Waldorf teachers was ever interested in this lecture that I gave in Oslo in 2006 about the future of education! But just think about it. You want to educate, you want in our time to do something truly creative and healing with children, youths, adults. But you will not transform yourself into a source of new life forces, you will not meet others as divine beings, you will not develop true brotherhood in the collegium of teachers, and therefore, you will have absolutely nothing to offer the children and youth. If you have no new life-forces to give, please find another job, less damaging. Do something productive in the industry, be a useful clerk in the bank. Creative earthly-human Sun life-forces, these are the forces of spiritual research, human meeting, true medicine and education, real agriculture…. The new etheric forces offered to all by the etheric Christ are required to do everything, arts and religion as well, everything that we want to do in cultural, social and practical daily life.

Therefore, why not listen to Rudolf Steiner’s words from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,  and- for a change- also do what he says?

This law must be strictly observed, and no student is genuine until he has adopted it as a guide for his whole life. This truth can be expressed in the following short sentence: Every idea which does not become your ideal kills a force in your soul; every idea which becomes your ideal creates within you life-forces…

I wanted to emphasize tonight again, risking of repeating myself. But without repetition no exercise, no exercise no training, no training in human meetings will always lead nowhere. I repeated myself, so please forgive me for being an old, repetitive guy.